Method and Apparatus for Generating Recommendations From Descriptive Information

A system comprising:

• at least one processor;
• and
• a memory storing program instructions, wherein the program instructions are executable by the at least one processor to:
• receive a tag cloud comprising one or more tags, wherein each tag specifies a descriptive word or phrase;
• determine a similarity value for each item in a collection of items, wherein each item in the collection is associated with a tag cloud comprising one or more tags, wherein each tag specifies a descriptive word or phrase related to the respective item, and wherein the similarity value indicates the strength of similarity of the received tag cloud to the tag cloud of the respective item in the collection;
• determine a subset of the items from the collection for which the similarity value is above a specified threshold;
• and
• return information related to the items in the subset as a list of recommended items corresponding to the received tag cloud, wherein the list of recommended items is configured to be displayed to a user interface.

A computer-readable storage medium storing program instructions, wherein the program instructions are computer-executable to implement:

• obtaining a tag cloud comprising one or more tags, wherein each tag specifies a descriptive word or phrase;
• determining a similarity value for each item in a collection of items, wherein each item in the collection is associated with a tag cloud comprising one or more tags, wherein each tag specifies a descriptive word or phrase related to the respective item, and wherein the similarity value indicates the strength of similarity of the obtained tag cloud to the tag cloud of the respective item in the collection;
• determining a subset of the items from the collection for which the similarity value is above a specified threshold;
• and
• displaying information related to the items in the subset as a list of recommended items corresponding to the obtained tag cloud.